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A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers —
including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry
Page — is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for
resources such as precious metals and water.

Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these
materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also
aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space,
with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps
our species spread throughout the solar system.

"If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go
to the near-Earth
asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman
Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so
easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the
low-hanging fruit of the solar system."

Platinum-group metals — ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium,
iridium, and platinum — are found in low concentrations on Earth
and can be tough to access, which is why they're so expensive. In
fact, Anderson said, they don't occur naturally in Earth's crust,
having been deposited on our planet over the eons by
asteroid impacts.

"We're going to go to the source," Anderson said. "The
platinum-group metals are many orders of magnitude easier to
access in the high-concentration platinum
asteroids than they are in the Earth's crust."

And there are a lot of
precious metals up there waiting to be mined. A single
platinum-rich space rock 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide contains
the equivalent of all the platinum-group metals ever mined
throughout human history, company officials said.

"When the availability of these metals increase[s], the cost will
reduce on everything including defibrillators, hand-held devices,
TV and computer monitors, catalysts," Planetary Resources
co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis said in a statement.
"And with the abundance of these metals, we’ll be able to use
them in mass production, like in automotive fuel cells."

Many asteroids are rich in water, too, another characteristic the
company plans to exploit. Once extracted, this water would be
sold in space, providing significant savings over water launched
from the ground.

Asteroid water could help astronauts stay hydrated and grow food,
provide radiation shielding for spaceships and be broken into its
constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket
fuel, Anderson said.

Planetary Resources hopes its mining efforts lead to the
establishment of
in-space "gas stations" that could help many spacecraft
refuel, from Earth-orbiting satellites to Mars-bound vessels.

In addition to Page, Planetary Resources counts among its
investors Ross Perot Jr., chairman of The Perot Group and son of
the former presidential candidate; Eric Schmidt, executive
chairman of Google; K. Ram Shriram, Google board of directors
founding member; and Charles Simonyi, chairman of Intentional
Software Corp., who has taken two tourist flights to the
International Space Station.

Cameron serves the company as an adviser, as does former NASA
space shuttle astronaut Tom Jones.

The plan

The company is not ready to break ground on an asteroid just yet.
Before that can happen, it needs to do some in-depth prospecting
work.

Of the roughly 8,900 known near-Earth asteroids, perhaps 100 or
150 are water-rich and easier to reach than the surface of the
moon, Anderson said. Planetary Resources wants to identify and
characterize these top targets before it does anything else.

To that end, it has designed a high-performance, low-cost space
telescope that Anderson said should launch to low-Earth orbit
within the next 18 to 24 months. This telescope will make
observations of its own but also serve as a model for future
instruments that will journey near promising asteroids and peer
at them in great detail.

The prospecting phase should take a couple of years or so,
Anderson added.

"We will then, at that time, determine which of these objects to
pursue first for resource extraction, and what mission we'll be
facilitating," he said. "Before you decide where to put the gas
station, you've got to understand where the trucks are going to
be driving by."

Mining activities will be enabled by swarms of unmanned
spacecraft, according to company materials. Planetary Resources
will focus on near-Earth asteroids, with no immediate plans to
extend its reach to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or
to the surface of the moon, Anderson said.

He declined to estimate when Planetary Resources would begin
extracting metals or water from space rocks, saying there are too
many variables to lay out a firm timeline. But a recent study
sponsored by Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies estimated
that a 500-ton near-Earth asteroid could be snagged and dragged
to the moon's orbit by 2025, at a cost of about $2.6 billion.

Whatever Planetary Resources' exact schedule may be, Anderson
said the company is already well on its way to making things
happen.

"We're out there right now, talking to customers," Anderson said.
"We are open for discussions with companies — aerospace
companies, mining companies, prospecting companies, resource
companies. We're out working in that field, to really open up the
solar system for business."

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on
Twitter:@michaeldwall.
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